


Visions

by TaleWorthTelling



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Dark, Disturbing Themes, M/M, disturbing imagery, mentions of experimentation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-07
Updated: 2013-07-07
Packaged: 2017-12-17 23:49:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/873310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TaleWorthTelling/pseuds/TaleWorthTelling
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The building is on fire.</p><p>He can’t be sure, but if he could trust his senses (which he can’t, not anymore), there’s definitely smoke seeping into the room, chalking his throat and burning his nostrils. It’s acrid. It’s hot.</p><p>It feels real. But so had yesterday.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Visions

The building is on fire.

He can’t be sure, but if he could trust his senses (which he can’t, not anymore), there’s definitely smoke seeping into the room, chalking his throat and burning his nostrils. It’s acrid. It’s hot.

It feels real. But so had yesterday.  
-

He stared at the ceiling and resolutely ignored the snake coiling around his limbs. He didn’t care how eccentric these fucking Hydra bastards were, you weren’t just gonna up and come across a goddamn King Cobra slithering through an Austrian forest. (Not like the ones he saw in Steve’s adventure books when they were kids, the ones he’d read to Bucky and then show him the pictures.) It couldn’t be real. It was not real.

The venom burned like fire through the crook of his elbow, shooting up his arm and crackling in his spine.

Not real. Not real. NotrealnotrealnotrealohGod—

It wasn’t a snake. It was the tongue of a great beast, no creature of this earth, drooling hot and rank up his body to hover over his temple, its eyes inky black circles protruding from its face. The face he was refusing to look at. Because it wasn’t real. The only monsters he believed in right now were wearing lab coats and peering at him over their glasses. They were real.

Probably.

He told himself the dampness was his own sweat. The sting was a needle. The snake’s strength holding him down, those were the straps cinching tighter. He’d probably been thrashing again. The monster …

“Surely the results from the current dosage are fascinating, Doctor, but not relevant to our studies. It will have to be titrated.”

The monster turned its back to him and retreated. He sighed in relief. The snake bit again and he was drowsy before he could even remind himself that it wasn’t real.  
-

The building is on fire and the snake grasps him tighter. The building is on fire and he knows there is no way out. He’s trapped. But he can’t really make himself care. For all that the table beneath him seems solid enough, he’s floating. If this is real, then they’ve left him to die here, and the quiet dignity of going out by anything but their hand seems good enough to him. They’ve seen him weak and writhing. They’ve seen him glassy-eyed and slack-jawed. They don’t get to watch him square off with God.

He sighs and begins to mumble his mantra one last time, the words that have been forced out between groans through drooling lips since this nightmare began. They haven’t gotten anything more out of him. And now they’ve missed their chance. That is, if the building really is on fire. If he’s really alone.

The explosions he finally begins to register probably account for the smoke, faint as it is. But it will reach him. It will come for him. And they’re getting louder.

For a moment he hears everything, coming up for air, and then the curtain falls again, like dunking his head underwater.

He hears the footfalls, though. They’re getting closer, too. They mean nothing. He won’t play along anymore.

Colors are bleeding down the walls in thick rivulets when he realizes that the footsteps have stopped and he’s not alone. The walls aren’t really bleeding, he knows, not like he’s bleeding. And the fiction staring down at him, plagiarized eyes full of concern, isn’t any more true to life. He lets the words wash over him anyway, comforted to know that he will always remember the sound of Steve’s voice, even if he apparently doesn’t know what he looks like.

The snakes are ripped away and fall to the floor harmless pieces of leather. The hallucination (this latest one) reaches for him, and he doesn’t have the strength to flinch away, not when he’s finally decided to face death head on like a man and not let them twist him around.

It’s not Steve. Steve is safe at home. Safe as he ever is. Bucky could wraps his arms around Steve and count his ribs. This likeness looks as healthy and hearty as he’d ever wanted Steve to be.

It’s not Steve, but, sure, what the hell. He’s always followed the guy everywhere anyway. Maybe it’s his drug-addled brain trying to tell him something. Certainly this is how Steve should always have looked, if virtue and guts and real strength counted any.

It strikes him that maybe this is the form in which death will come for him. He likes that thought, Steve an avenging angel of mercy come to take him away from this place.

So he goes, and he talks with his sub-consciousness, humors himself, stumbles along. He watches it stand tall against the red monster, doesn’t hear the words, but knows the image is one he’s seen before, just without all the bulk. It’s the kind of heroic, noble moment Steve would have read about as a child and immortalized on scraps of paper with stubs of pencil Bucky’d pilfered for him. And then it’s over, seconds choppy like Bucky’s missed something, and the next thing he knows he’s staring at not-Steve over a river of fire. And damned if Bucky’s not leaving this world with every part of him he can salvage. He’s missing so much already. He’s not going to be defeated by his own mind, too.  
-

They tell him that he’d marched back to camp with the men from the facility. They tell him that he’d never left Captain America’s side, never let him out of sight, but Bucky doesn’t remember this. He really only wakes up when he finally showers. It’s almost like he can feel the filth Hydra’d laced through his mind melting away, slipping down the drain. And he knows this is real because he could never have imagined feeling this clean when he’d forgotten what that was like months ago.

He’s starting to wonder if maybe he’d really had a dime-store novel adventure and survived the whole damn thing, crazy as it is. He’s starting to feel human again. Starting to look people full in the face and actually see what they look like, not amalgams of torment and fever. Starting to feel his heart, stuttering oddly these last few weeks, beat strong and steady again. The pain is receding. Nothing holds him down. He walks around the camp just because he can. The colors never dissolve into one another. The grass is muddy-brown and the sky is an ugly gray and these are things he’s familiar with, not parodies of them.

But Captain America says he’s Steve. And he looks like Steve. Talks like Steve. Had rescued Bucky from that nightmare just as surely as Bucky had thought him his guide across the river Styx. But they’re alive. He’s not Bucky’s passage to the other side. They’re still here.

He presses his hand to Captain America’s chest, now the hard tension of muscle instead of the no-give of bone, just to feel his heart beating, to feel the life, to explore this new body because he’s allowed. (Because it's his imagination anyway). Feel his lungs inflate fully, his broad chest expanding impossibly where once it had tightened and wheezed. His skin is warm like the flames he’d leapt across. The Steve Bucky remembers had shivered under every meager blanket and sweater they owned and felt cool to the touch under the weight of Bucky’s arm slung over his waist in their tiny bed. Too tiny for this behemoth for sure now.

His mind is clearer and sharper every day, but every day he wakes up and Steve isn’t there. The Captain is.

He wonders if he has left more parts of himself behind than he thought, crumbling to ash in the smoldering remains of the Austrian factory. Or maybe Bucky’s the one who isn’t real after all.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for this prompt: http://stevebucky-fest.dreamwidth.org/307.html?thread=152371#cmt152371 
> 
>  
> 
> Whew, that was dark.
> 
>  
> 
> Thanks for reading.


End file.
